* Little-known fact: Mosiah had not only sons, but daughters. In fact, his daughter Eowyn went to the Lamanites as well, and famously struck down an evil Zoramite chief of whom it was said that no man could slay, as she cried out “I am no man.” Or, of you prefer the book text, “But no living man am I.”

While I can’t say I’ve sampled every denomination’s blogging community, I think the UU bloggers come as close to the self-critical perspective of many Bloggernacle sites as any other denomination I’ve seen. Catholic and Evangelical sites tend to be devotional or apologetic but rarely critical (i.e., I have yet to see anything analogous to T&S or Bcc for other denominations, and I’ve been looking for six months). I think we can thank that marvelous FARMS/Sunstone partnership for helping LDS pseudo-intellectuals approach Mormon Studies issues in this inquisitive but constructive way.

“As a post-Mormon myself, I see Mormon blogs serving a function that even magazines like Dialogue and Sunstone never quite seemed able to do: they have set up bridges across Mormonism’s ideological chasms and given younger intellectual Mormons a way to engage the larger world of ideas.”

The opportunity to actively engage ideas found in Mormonism and to discuss them in a friendly, yet challenging, environment has been one of the main motivations for my visits to T&S and other sites in the Bloggernacle. Still, I wonder how long this will all last. The comments section to Kaimi’s post about Mormon elites makes me fear that productive cross-fertilization between those who take different perspectives within Mormonism is coming to an end. The great German-Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim (who I expect none of you are familiar with and that’s okay) indicated that ideological discussion need not always result in synthesis. What we more often see is polarization. As a consequence, polarization also often results in hurt feelings.

I know this is tangential to this post but I felt like expressing it here rather than somewhere else.